Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians

Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era image, ‘Toward Los Angeles, California, March, 1937’, also appears on the cover of Geoffrey O’Gara’s ‘A Long Road Home'(which may be found below, under ‘Multiple Uses’). For the cover of Peter Guralnik’s book about American musicians and music, however, the right half of the image (now hand-tinted), which includes a billboard stating ‘Next time, try the train’, is blocked, leaving only the two itinerants, walking down a dusty road. This alteration almost entirely defuses the wit and dark irony of Lange’s original picture, but is necessary to represent the content of a book of this sort. To include the entire image would telegraph the meaning of the book in a different, less accurate direction. KB

See ‘Multiple Uses’ for other books with the same cover image: